One of Detroit's two black-owned and -operated television stations began broadcasting in October, 1975, as an independent, nonnetwork-affiliated channel. The diffusion theory of Rogers and Shoemaker, which assumes that adoption of an innovation is affected by the potential adopter's perception of the innovation's attributes, was applied in a two-wave telephone survey to evaluate the station's effectiveness in reaching the black audience. Phase one, a systematic random sample of all Detroit telephone numbers, and phase two, calls only to blacks, consisted of telephone interviews where questions were structured according to the diffusion theory's five attributes necessary for adoption of an innovation; trialability, complexity, observability, compatibility, and advantages. The findings reveal that the diffusion model worked for black Americans in ways similar to previous studies on whites, that the black minority group is more dependent on interpersonal sources of information than is the more dominant group, and that by the second collection of data, regular viewing of the black television station had decreased considerably. (MAI)